betajames

Not all forms of communication are created equal. For establishing trust, video is better than audio (with no video), and audio is better than a chat window. The logic of this hierarchy seems intuitive: People communicate as much, if not more, with how an idea is conveyed, than with what it said. Shifty eyes and raised shoulders can reveal anxiety; intonation can convey passion. The more non-substantive information the medium can convey, the more data a listener has to decide how trustworthy the speaker is.

When we moved to compulsory schooling, kids began to learn not from master doers so much as from master knowers, because we decided there were certain things that every child needed to know in order to be “educated.” And we looked for adults who could impart that knowledge, who could teach it in ways that every child could learn it.

My sense is that we need to rethink the role of those adults once again, and that we’re coming full circle.

Studies that accuse social networks of reducing productivity assume that time spent microblogging is time strictly wasted. But that betrays an ignorance of the creative process. Humans weren’t designed to maintain a constant focus on assigned tasks. We need periodic breaks to relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking. Musing about something else for a while can clear away the mental detritus, letting us see an issue through fresh eyes, a process that creativity researchers call incubation.

Blogs and social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter enable an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to split their time between the computer screen and the big-screen TV.

The Nielsen Company, which measures television viewership and Web traffic, noticed this month that one in seven people who were watching the Super Bowl and the Olympics opening ceremony were surfing the Web at the same time.

Brush your teeth because it fights tooth decay, not because you get points for it. Read a book because it enriches your mind, not because your Kindle score goes up. Play a game because it's intellectually stimulating or relaxing or challenging or social, not because of your Xbox Live Achievement score.

There's still a need for decent studies that assess their impact on behaviour. One such study has emerged from Denison University, where Robert Weis and Brittany Cerankosky have tested what happens when you give young boys, aged 6-9, a new video game system. 

They found that after 4 months, boys who had received the games had lower reading and writing scores than expected, failing to improve to the same degree as their console-less peers. They also faced more academic problems at school. At first this might seem like support for the rewired brains of Greenfield's editorials, but the reality is much simpler - the games were displacing other after-school academic activities. While some children were finishing their homework or reading bedtime stories, those with games were mashing buttons.

Right now it’s typical for a history department to require the publication of a book for tenure—some places, like my own institution, will accept five peer-reviewed articles (which basically means you can cannibalize your dissertation).  Writing a serious book in six years (the average time for tenure review) is no mean feat, but keep in mind that every newly minted Ph.D. has already done most of the research for his or her book when the tenure clock starts.  It’s just a matter of revising the dissertation into a book.  Not easy, but then again, not a project that necessarily demands six years. It’s perhaps for this reason that some universities are starting to demand the publication of a book and “significant progress” toward a second.

The discovery is that the players exist in your game in two instances, the "avatar" and the "organism". The avatar is, of course, what is rendered on screen; the organism is what is left of the player after passing through the plane into the game world -- the preservation the game's functionality and its translation into in-game abilities.

In nature, there is no "avatar", since a creature's body is an exact representation of the organism's capabilities. In games, however, there is an inherent discrepancy between the two -- since the developer dictates in detail the embodiment of the organism. The game might dictate that the hero is a space marine; the challenge, however, is to design a user interface -- or let's call it "organism interface" -- that makes the player feel adequately that he or she is a space marine.

The history of game design is not simply a result of technological developments, but increases in data storage capacity certainly allowed the scrolling game to replace the non-scrolling game: suddenly, new playing experiences came from games that were data-intensive, and the processual economy of the changing level layout became less important.

Learning to play any game is a process of creating strategies for playing that game, but changing the level layout forces the player to constantly reconsider his or her strategies. In the history of video games, this way of creating variation was superseded by data storage, by new games with vast expanses for the player to explore.

Amit Singhal types that koan into his company’s search box. Singhal, a gentle man in his forties, is a Google Fellow, an honorific bestowed upon him four years ago to reward his rewrite of the search engine in 2001. He jabs the Enter key. In a time span best measured in a hummingbird’s wing-flaps, a page of links appears. The top result connects to a listing for an attorney named Michael Siwek in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s a fairly innocuous search — the kind that Google’s servers handle billions of times a day — but it is deceptively complicated. Type those same words into Bing, for instance, and the first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, there’s no direct referral to Siwek.